


that newborn city given, a sincere and curséd gift

by Nemonus



Category: Assassin's Creed - All Media Types
Genre: Absolute Nightmare, Background Tarhaqa/Maharet, Canon Compliant, Character Study, F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-06
Updated: 2018-06-06
Packaged: 2019-05-19 02:52:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,902
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14865242
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nemonus/pseuds/Nemonus
Summary: Who else, even among the Order of Ancients, could say that they had built a city? Letopolis would turn as steadily as a wheel. Tarhaqa’s purpose was to keep the rest in good repair. So what that sometimes his vision blurred, the Horus faces contorting as if with distance? So what that his new work crew, the new citizens of Letopolis, whispered about ghosts?(Basically the Scarab's Lies mission, with more Sekhmet.)





	that newborn city given, a sincere and curséd gift

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to [beeawolf](https://archiveofourown.org/users/beeawolf/pseuds/beeawolf) for beta-reading, multiple times.

It started in Yamu, grief-drunk. Bayek of Siwa had decided to help foster the town in so many ways in such quick succession that he could not keep them from bleeding into one another. They leapt and spun in his memory, even before the god rode him.

The children had run in ivory-white corridors, laughter that was not like Khemu’s laughter and steps that were not like Khemu’s steps, and Bayek had followed (steps that were not like Bayek’s, laughter that was not like Bayek’s). Then the boxer had wallowed drunk on the same flagstones and, why _not_ take his place? Bayek would do his service to the temple, show some kindness to the farmers from the outskirts and the tourists with full purses and sleek-furred camels. The heavy head of the Sekhmet semblance smelled slightly of sweat, but not enough to become malodorous; just a suggestion of the drunken man and the weight of the leather. Bayek fought, and to do a friend a favor was almost like having a family again, almost but not so close as to be painful.

The pain came when the ceremonial spear— hollow and light, but _gods_ it stung — slapped against his chest. The crowd outside the bounds of the arena gasped. Bayek had a duty here, he remembered, a small and flashy duty to the tourists of Yamu, to tell them that order would win over chaos. Through the narrow slits in the mask he saw pilgrims with dusty feet, and fishermen in their finest clothes waving, with their children in their arms. These were like but unlike the people of Siwa, the ones he would recognize from silhouettes and footsteps and whom he would trust around his open door in the hot afternoon or cool evening.

When it started, when the god came and it all really lurched into a gallop, he felt the wrath of Sekhmet like the weight of the cowl. The wildness and the wrath flowed like a flood from between his shoulder blades, cascading over the top of his head into the jaws of the mask. Energy cycled around and around as he jabbed his spear forward. Music from outside the ring sang: _rise, mistress of dread, power in her name_ , and he felt the claws encircle his hands. Extended one hand out and snapped the other back, driving the body of the spear under the Isfet boxer’s armpit, and with a grunt of more surprise than pain the temple fighter woke up to the idea that Bayek was fast and heavy and had found his stride.

This was how the liberation of Letopolis began. 

* * *

On the day Tarhaqa welcomed Maharet to Letopolis for the first time, the workers dug a passage into the temple complex north all the way down to the river. 

Maharet had hardscrabble but reliable clients who needed houses built in Sais. Her husband understood she would need to return to her work, as well as to Ghupa and Kawab. It was hard work, for an architect in a swamp! But she had chosen to see her husband and his project. The old man had business as well, Ghupa insisted, although Taharqa suspected that this business consisted primarily of strategy games with other old men. He would not find greatness in Sais, although Safetu organized the old and damp town and the nome as well as he could. He kept people orderly, made sure dissidents died where the common folk could see them.

Maharet stood on the balcony of the home Taharqa had chosen for himself in Letopolis. Soft orange light washed out from the windows, the pale stone of the temple almost glowing before her. It painted her skin in soft colors, haloed her. Without looking at him she reached out and toyed with the copper bracelets around Taharqa’s left wrist.

“It is a fine city,” she said. “Artisans spoke of it on the road. They’ve heard from friends who came and stayed.”

“It will be one day. When enough people come of their own will to push the sand back into the desert, it will be enough,” Taharqa said.

“And what about that tongue of sand in the temple? I saw four men with carts trying to clear it out,” Mararet said.

“Eventually, it will be done. The overseer is working on more scaffolds.”

“She’s smart. We spoke about fortifying the scaffolding in the east, where the wind blows strongest, but then it’s possible that the dunes will collapse back onto the first row of houses,” Maharet said.

“The storehouses should be reinforced as well. Maybe they can be done when the laborers come in tomorrow. Artists are coming in every day, but they build more slowly.” 

Maharet gave a thin smile, the sort of fireside tolerance she gave to Kawab’s toy-building. She was fond of Letopolis’ pilgrims, but knew that she and Tarhaqa would be the ones who needed to pick their toys up off the floor. Though she had never been inducted into the Order of Ancients, she understood the process of building. She understood that people must strive for greatness. It was an imperative, a force as strong and regular as the river. All served in different ways.

They had met in the course of the great work, two apprentices watching city blocks rise in Sais, learning how to build on sandy ground and swamp and how to prize good dirt.

Taharqa took a deep breath of dry air, breathed it out through lips chapped by the wind through the temple. Maharet nestled her head on the crook of her arm. He looked at the orange light on her skin and then past her, to the walls. “I believe we were called here, Maharet. You can see the pyramids from the temple of Horus, reaching up. They show what people can achieve when we reach for greatness.”

“Those old pyramids.” She sighed into her arm. “They say they’re haunted, sometimes. People see strange things out in the desert.”

“But this city will be new! Then we will drive the ghosts out as we have done the bandits.”

“Which bandits?” She looked up.

“Reavers.” He folded his arms. They were both an inconvenience and a help; people were so willing to blame them for any death or any supplies which disappeared from the road. He did not want to tell her too much about how useful they were. “People driven out of the White Desert from hunger, unwilling or unable to ask for help at Sais. There has been some trouble.”

“There always is some. You know, this is why I disagree with you about old cities. Sais is well-positioned to give even people on the outskirts what they want. You will compete with everything here. People, animals, ghosts.”

Both of them unruffled like vultures, shedding sand. The orange light fell over her forearms and his. Taharqa said, “We will win.”

* * *

Bayek walked Letopolis looking for cats. 

Pets or mousers slipped out of doorways and along walls, looking with sideways disinterest before hopping toward him and laying down in the dust. Bayek took the time to pet them even while still looking over his shoulder. Hands with dirt under the nails were just fine for rifling through a cat’s fur, or scratching thin bellies. Bayek needed to meet Tarhaqa to talk about the Scarab soon, but both himself and the city planner could do with a moment of peace. 

He idled beside one of the odd, sand-covered houses and stopped, idly rubbing a spotted gray cat’s ear. The empty houses were eerie. No wonder people had seen strange writings and signs. The hieroglyphs seemed to float as he looked at them, letters wavering. No wonder, either, that the townsfolk had seen ghosts. The cat began to purr. The letters flowed like a mirage, and behind them, Bayek thought he could hear the roar of lions.

Bayek shook his head to clear his thoughts. Two more cats appeared around windblown corners, one sand-colored and one orange. 

“Hey, miu. We’ll both do our work, eh?”

* * *

The next time he saw blood in the desert was when he fought beside Tarhaqa. The city planner of Letopolis knew the land he worked on, lead Bayek around blocks of stone he could hardly see in the sandstorm. He had missed fighting beside someone, and, if he admitted it, also appreciated that Taharqa was not someone he knew well. Hepzefa might have fought like this. But Tarhaqa was not a friend, not a soul-close partner Bayek could lose, and for that reason he enjoyed the wildness of the fight. He could meet this person new, understand him in the quick code of sword-and-steel instead of over long quiet years. 

Tarhaqa ran head-down against the sandstorm as if he didn’t feel it. Bayek cut into a reaver’s chest with one of his two short swords. Just as the body fell, he saw Tarhaqa swing the longsword two-handed into the shoulder of another.

Tarhaqa was less fanatical than Bayek had expected, less like the artisans who had given him his first impressions of Letopolis. He had expected a town built on idealism and insufficient planning, but most people here seemed well-fed and watered. A remote town in Sefetu’s territory would not be easy to hang on to, but Bayek was beginning to think that Tarhaqa was the corrupt official’s match. He fought the reavers well, short, quick sword-cuts not unlike Bayek’s own early medjay training.

Bayek shook his head, waiting tired and cold, while Tarhaqa released the Memphian priest. He would need to clean the blood off his sword. For now, cold crawled down his spine, the aftermath of the fight wracking through him. It would pass.

“Who were they?” Bayek asked.

“Blood-fevered followers of Sekhmet, the Lady of Slaughter. They wish nothing more than chaos and ruin.”

There were always reavers and bandits picking on the unprotected on the roads. But that name. Tarhaqa invoked Sekhmet. Bayek felt his skin prickle. The ceremonial armor he still wore, reinforced and scratched and repaired many times, seemed to tighten. At the same time he felt an uplifting ease, as he did in the presence of a god. He remembered the temple in Yamu well and often. Sekhmet, it seemed, remembered him too.   

“Are they connected to the Scarab?” Bayek asked.

“No.” Tarhaqa spoke like a trained orator, echoing in the foul cave. “They think themselves lions, but they are no more than carrion eaters. And now they will feed the scavengers!”

Indeed, the Scarab would be a far more formidable opponent. Bayek looked around the hideout while Tarhaqa spoke to the priest. When he opened the cage the priest stumbled, weak, and Tarhaqa caught him under the arms. He would take responsibility for his people and neatly build the legend of his town at the same time.

* * *

Not long after his initial sweep of Letopolis, Bayek had found the strange writing on the walls. He had a technique, born of Siwa and the larger cities he had explored along the way, to get the lay of a place and the people who lived there. Few travelers had brought their children with them to Letopolis. Many young families wanted to raise children yet unborn in the unburied town: Bayek had spoken with Chief Nito, and waved to fathers chiseling toys out of scrap wood left over from the pieces used to build their homes. There was no unifying look, no universal sign in the eyes of the idea of a child. Still, Bayek felt a tug at his own center.

How likely were they to tell the truth to a man with the badge Cleopatra had given him? The people in Letopolis were too far-flung to have a local identity yet, driven by hope and aspiration. They were also trusting by nature, lead here by criers and promises, so he had not encountered any resistance, or even any of the city-bred rushing he found in Alexandria. Medjay meant something here.

That might also be why an arrow slashed through the air in front of him, burying itself in the sand. It came from between the lions, above the Temple of One Million Years, where Bayek had traced the mysterious hieroglyphs.

He crouched to the ground and dashed toward the shoulder of the nearest statue. Another arrow clattered off the rock. Bayek drew his twin short swords.

Another bandit slid around the corner of the crumbling statue. One would stay out of range and the other jump in, if past experience was any indication. Bayek stabbed for the heart.

The bandit swung and the three blades ricocheted against one another. Bayek swung again, cut into the man’s sword arm. His shoulder dropped. Bayek aimed for the collar and left the man sliding down the dune, blood trailing after him. The archer would be close. Bayek edged around the stone lion’s serene head, unslinging his heavy hunter’s bow. The wind blew too loudly for him to hear footsteps, but he waited anyway, counting heartbeats under the hot sun. 

A small silhouette hunched over the next dune. Bayek loosed an experimental arrow, made the bandit duck their head back down. He shuffled toward the ruined temple, hoping for cover from the walls.

The bandit didn’t reappear. Bayek ran along the base of one of the taller walls, followed what might once have been a hallway in the temple back up the nearest dune. Footsteps, almost blown away by the wind already, lead him to the bandit with his bow still strung, looking down over the ranks of stone lions.

Bayek soft-footed down, then drove his wrist blade into the side of the archer’s neck. The arrow slid down the hill as the body went limp. He scrambled back down the hill, wary of more bandits, and found a crack in one of the stone walls without having intended to find it.

The cold of the shadowed crevasse made the hair on his arms stand up. He moved further into the old temple, brushing cobwebs from the clay pots. 

In the Temple of a Million Years Bayek turned over the statues of Sekhmet, looking for clues to the buried history and numbly categorizing each forgotten holy piece. The sacrificial deaths were shocking, but the fact that none of this was acknowledge in the newly excavatedtemple was doubly so.

So, Letopolis had been sacrificed to the desert, and Tarhaqa was going against the will of the priests that came before in order to bring the city back. Tarhaqa’s apparent piety concealed — even exacerbated — the hubris of his blasphemy.

Cold shivers climbed across his shoulders and down his arms. The place swam with golden motes, sand or the curtain between the worlds making him blink. He was certain it wasn’t fatigue; disgust created these mirages. The skeletons weren’t as bad as the texts, the cold implication of the wrongness of the new town. What was he supposed to _do_ now? The need for action was urgent.

The scroll said: _We invoke you in all your names and all your places, and give you this city as a gift._

Bayek drummed his fingers on the scarred-over tattoos on his arm.

* * *

Tarhaqa looked with pride and derision on the wooden carts and animals Kawab built. Evening light had not yet started to fall. Maharet had just arrived; he heard her helping Ghupa to his chair. When Bayek arrived for dinner, Tarhaqa would give him the poisoned wine and be on his way. The medjay had steadfastly evaded bandits and lions. Tarhaqa had hoped that the desert would take him, but Bayek seemed to be a difficult man to kill. The wine was not an ideal solution, but it would do. 

A person must know how to build wheels that turn, supports that hold weight, before building cities. Kawab would likely be a candidate for induction one day, perhaps taking the mask of the Scarab after Tarhaqa had finished his work. He would shake the foundations of the Earth, would built stairways from the field of reeds to the Nile accounting for all forces in between. Toy carts were a start.

Toy carts were a beginning. 

Sometimes he wished the Order, or the part of him that knew what the Order wanted, saw the same potential in Marahet. She had ambition, too, but she was too attached to Sais and to her family to look beyond them. He felt guilty keeping secrets from her, but guilt was a sort of pleasure, a selfishness that supposed he could change the world without changing the work of his hands, and he understood that it should not be indulged in too frequently. Besides, perhaps Maharet had some secrets of her own.

Some secret triumph would explain why she told Kawab to stay in the central room as Ghupa lowered himself carefully onto a pillow. Some good news after some bad would explain why she fell into the Scarab’s ( _his falsename, his truth, his shield_ ) arms in the courtyard, tucking her head against his chest as if to bury herself in his clothing. The lioness despaired for her cub. While Tarhaqa hoped that Kawab might be inducted into the Order one day, but there were so many plans to make before that could happen. He could drive himself to distraction wondering whether the boy would want that, whether he would understand, or whether he would even be safe. 

But also, he reminded himself as he held Maharet tight around her shoulders, she was grieving for Ghupa.

That, too, would explain the collapse. She had made it such a fierce collapse that he had thought it was a falcon’s killing plummet. Things would be better for her if the Order worked true to its name and organized things. People would be free to build new cities, to bury that which had failed to thrive when the sand came in. Yes, he knew about the sacrifice (even though Maharet did not).

(Why keep it from her, if he did not see it as guilt?)

The old priests had failed. They were dust and heiroglyphs. The Scarab’s legacy would remain unto the end of the world.

Maharet stirred. Tarhaqa kept his eyes on the cups over her shoulder, the wine, the thin layer of powder which was the almost colorless poison. Something moved behind him, like a curtain flapping in the wind, although there should not have been any cloth there.

“He’s been so gracious,” Maharet whispered, not wanting her father to hear her praise his composure in the face of injury. “I keep thinking about how he never complained about his work, never about taxes, never about … anything, and now I just want to hear him say that he’s hurt.”

Tarhaqa stroked her back and kept his secret. Because of his and Safetu’s harsh mercy, Ghupa was still alive. Tarhaqa had done that for Maharet.

The rest had been for history. People would remember Letopolis long after it was gone. Who else, even among the Order of Ancients, could say that they had built a city? Letopolis would turn as steadily as a wheel. Tarhaqa’s purpose was to keep the rest in good repair. So what that sometimes his vision blurred, the Horus faces contorting as if with distance? So what that his new work crew, the new citizens of Letopolis, whispered about ghosts? They labored for free. He would allow them eccentricity.

Maharet slipped away from him to tend to Ghupa. Tarhaqa kissed her ear as she left, felt with one hand lingering on her shoulder when some of the fear and anger eased away from her body. He crossed his arms, suddenly cold. Everything was in order. The cup stood ready. Sefetu’s soldiers waited for his signal to take the medjay away.

Everything would be easier, after. 

His family waited to start dinner in the familiar exhausted quiet of workmen after a long day, pulling from a communal bowl. Tarhaqa dipped his fingers in the small bowl of water beside him, stirring the sand left by the person who had cleaned their hands before. He returned to it several times, distracting himself so that he did not stare at the table, then poured the wine.

Tarhaqa savored his secret with his wine, then cleared his head of both.

When Bayek took his wine he drank like a man who had fought shoulder-to-shoulder all afternoon with Tarhaqa’s noble, closed-eared temple soldiers, the ones who did not know about the dead priests.

When the poison hit him Bayek acted like a soldier too, throwing himself across the room to get away from whatever snake had bitten him. He would be dangerous if he lashed out now; he could turn over the table or scream something accusatory. Tarhaqa held him, a host concerned for his guest’s welfare and, in the same movement, keeping him from lunging for the door.

* * *

Bayek knew.

Gods take that snake, who had thought his hubris could change the face of the entire desert and spit in the face of the gods meanwhile. Tarhaqa had allied with Safetu. Bayek’s head still ached from the heat that might have killed him if not for Senu. Tarhaqa had ignored the will of the devout, dead wab priests and desecrated their work. He had _laughed_ when Bayek spoke of the Scarab! He had been lying from the start. Perhaps he had hoped that Bayek would die in the fight against the reavers, and had concealed his disappointment with chilling poise ever after. The Sekhmet cultists were not really blood-fevered as Tarhaqa had said; Tarhaqa simply favored the priests he had invited! The more Bayek thought about it, the more he was uncertain whether he had seen a high priest in the temple along with the wab priests and builders.

Bayek ran along the roof of the Letopolis temple, one hand on the hilt of his sword. When he drew those swords against the grand planner there would be no turning back. The lives of the people of Letopolis would change once their leader was dead. Whether Ramessu would keep preaching Bayek did not know, and with each touch of the hot, dry wind against his face as he ran he cared even less. Already he had killed several guards more well-armed than the usual temple attendants. Tarhaqa had seen this all coming.

Perhaps not all of it. Bayek swayed before the drop into the courtyard. Tarhaqa prayed below, head bowed to the stone. Bayek could drop on him from here. He breathed deeply, preparing for a jump that would be almost a moment of respite. Then the wind rose again.

Either something magical and uncanny tingled at his spine, or he had slept wrong out in the desert and needed to stretch. He was getting too old for loud gods. The old tended more devoutly to the gods who stayed quietly in their holy of holies, keeping a mutual promise not to cause trouble in town. 

Senu circled above. As he tensed for the jump, Bayek was young and feather-light, young and crocodile-strong. As he pushed up onto his toes, Bayek conjured Khemu’s time-blurred face and felt the heavy bloody weight of Sekhmet’s teeth in his own mouth. 

This was how the liberation of Letopolis ended.

Bayek leapt. In the temple the scroll read _Breathe the desert upon it and consume it, take it whole._


End file.
